david stoll - wage migration to debt migration

7/30/2019 David Stoll - Wage Migration to Debt Migration

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David Stoll is a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College. For comments on earlier ver-sions he thanks John Sherman, Walter Little, Fred Krissman, Leon Fink, Ed Kissam, Armando

Alfonso, Sandy Davis, Ann Miles, John Maluccio, Stener Ekern, Eli Sutton, Ben Stoll, Jan Rus,and the LAP editorial board.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 170, Vol. 37 No. 1, January 2010 123-142DOI: 10.1177/0094582X09355430 2010 Latin American Perspectives

From Wage Migration to Debt Migration?

Easy Credit, Failure in El Norte, and Foreclosure ina Bubble Economy of the Western Guatemalan Highlands

byDavid Stoll

In the 1990s there were two new ideas to make the Ixil Mayas of Nebaj, Guatemala,self-sufficient. The first idea, conceived by microcredit consultants, was to make it easier

for the Ixils to borrow money so that they could become entrepreneurs. The second idea,conceived by Ixils, was to use the credits to smuggle themselves into U.S. labor markets.In the process, Ixils turned many of the credits into loans to other Ixils at 10 percentinterest per month. By 2006-2007 many stateside Ixils were failing to find enough work to

pay their loans, and their serial debts were collapsing back in Nebaj. Currently an associa-tion of Nebaj women is asking international organizations and the Guatemalan govern-ment to save their houses and land from foreclosure. The stories that Ixils tell suggestthat migration is a highly competitive process not just in U.S. labor markets but in thesending population, where people are being forced to go north by remittance- and credit-driven inflation. Their stories also suggest that migration is a process that runs on debt,with migrants indebting themselves and their relatives to the migration stream in waysthat many are unable to repay. The debts not only enable migration but require more

people to migrate north, in a chain of exploitation that may suck more value from the send-ing population than it returns.

Keywords: Migration, Debt, Credit, Guatemala, Ixils, Mayas, Peasants, NGOs

My first intimation that debt could be the motor of migration came on awarm evening in Baltimore. I was visiting an ex-combatant of the GuerrillaArmy of the Poor. Now he worked for a Korean grocer 72 hours a week. He,his two sons, and ten other Guatemalans were living in a three-bedroomapartment in a heavily patrolled complex that seemed to include people fromall over the world. Suddenly the revolving lights of a squad car flashed acrossthe quad. Burly paramedics were trying to strap a drunk, bawling Guatemalan

youth to a gurney. The kid had punched his stepfather in the face, the stepfa-ther had grabbed the phone to call the police, and the stepson had fallen or

jumped off a second-story balcony. They were quarreling over the debt heowed for his trip to the United States, and he had been talking about killinghimself because he could not find work.

Mexican and Central American migration to the United States is attractingmuch attention, but I have yet to find any research that focuses on the necessary


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124 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

underpinning of debt. I say necessary because where else can CentralAmerican peasants find the US$5,000 they need to get through Mexico andacross the U.S. border? If the U.S. labor market needed them, relatives withstable U.S. jobs would pay for the trip and new arrivals would soon work offthe debt. But many of the stateside Guatemalans I meet do not have stable

jobs, and it is unclear that the U.S. economy needs them. Five months beforethe September 2008 credit collapse, in Homestead, Florida, at 7:30 a.m. Icounted more than 100 Guatemalans standing beside the road in one locationa hiring line in which no one was getting hired. Worse, there was nothing verynew about their plight. For several years Guatemalans have been strugglingto find work in Homestead, and yet more have continued to arrive. Are theydeluded by media images of the fabulous life to be had in El Norte? Or havethey kept coming not because they are pulled by the wages (which in Homesteadare often below the legal minimum) but because they are pushed by their debtsback in Guatemala?

In sociocultural anthropology and Latin American studies, the prevailingassumption is that migrants are being forced to come to the United States byneoliberalism (but see Kyle, 2000, and Cohen, 2004) and that migration isbroadly beneficial to both migrants and their sending communities (but seeFletcher, 1999; Levitt, 2001; Miles, 2004; Nazario, 2006; Smith, 2006; and Foxen,2007). Ethnographers refer to debt, but no one seems to burrow into it, at leastin Latin America. The closest scholarly literature that I can find focuses on themicrocredit industry (Lont and Hospes, 2004) but mainly in South Asia, whereanthropologists and sociologists have taken on the Grameen Bank and itsfounder, Muhammed Yunis, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Debt is easy to ignore because migrants are often reticent about it, but it hasbecome a public issue in the Ixil Maya town of Nebaj because of the suddenbursting of an economic bubble. For two decades, a blissful succession ofinternational aid projects, low-interest loans, and remittances from the UnitedStates enabled thousands of Nebajenses to prosper as never before. Thensomething went wrong, in the year before the U.S. credit crisis, and thousandsof Ixils fell behind on their payments. Currently an association of Nebajwomen is asking international organizations and the Guatemalan governmentto save their houses and land from foreclosure.

What follows is a fortuitous window on an obscure subjecthow Guatemalansuse formal and informal credit to finance unauthorized migration to the UnitedStates. The town that has suddenly thrown open this window is not a typicalMayan Indian townit has received more aid projects than any other inGuatemalabut I am eager to know if other researchers are hearing echoesof what I have heard. The stories Nebajenses are telling suggest that migra-tion is a highly competitive process not just in U.S. labor markets but in thesending population, fueled by competition over land, inheritances, jobs, andscarce opportunities for upward mobility. Nebajense stories also suggest thatmigration is a process that runs on debt, with migrants indebting themselvesand their relatives to the migration stream in ways that many are unable torepay, resulting in the loss of homes and productive assets. The debts notonly enable migration but require more people to migrate north, in a chainof exploitation that may suck more value from the sending population thanit returns.


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Stoll / FROM WAGE MIGRATION TO DEBT MIGRATION? 125

NEBAJ AS AN INTERNATIONAL PROJECT HUB

When I visited Nebaj for the first time in November 1982, it was a quiet,scared town occupied by the Guatemalan army as it chased Marxist guerrillasin the surrounding mountains. At one point much of the Mayan population,

which is predominantly Ixil but includes a dynamic Kiche minority, seemedto support the Guerrilla Army of the Poor not just in Nebaj but in the neigh-boring municipios of Cotzal and Chajul. In retaliation, the Guatemalan armycommitted massacres and burned down the rural settlements. Thousands ofpeople died, and more than a third of the population took refuge in born-againProtestant churches, whose members now provide a majority of the townsleadership.

Since then the guerrillas have demobilized, the army has dwindled to aplatoon, and Nebaj has become the most bustling town in the region. Thanksto the many aid projects, Ixils and their Kiche neighbors have replaced the

domestic livestock they lost in the war. They are growing a wider repertoire ofagricultural products. Shuttle looms bang out textiles. Ixils have taken over thelocal teaching profession, and thousands of Ixil youth have obtained secondaryeducation. Ixils are in charge of the municipal government, dozens of Protestantcongregations, and the Catholic parish. The streets are filled with pickups,motorcycles, and careening three-wheeled taxis. Teenage girls clump by inhigh heels gabbing on cell phones. A delegate from the European Union vis-ited for the first time, saw all the three-story houses going up, and exclaimed:This has got to be the drug trade!

No, it is first of all the result of international projects, especially from the

European Union, in an aid bonanza that began in the late 1980s and shows nosign of ending. The justification for the endless parade of new programs is thatmost of Nebajs population was displaced by the war. True, but equally dev-astated municipios have never been deluged with projects like the Nebajenses.What makes them such a magnet for international donors? Looking hand-some, having a knack for getting on with foreigners, and living in a majesticmountain valley have not hurt, and so the Ixils have become calendar Mayas,in two senses. Their diviners still use the Mayan calendar, and the splendor oftheir traditional female dress gets them into calendars put out by aid organi-zations as symbolic capital for fundraising.

This is not to say that the Ixil-internationalist marriage is a happy one. Whatmotivates the Ixils welcoming international organizations is their desire tosuperar(get ahead), not their loyalty to the picturesque traditions that foreignersso prize. While some families are plaintiffs in the genocide indictments againstformer dictator General Efran Ros Montt (19821983), many more Ixils havevoted for Ros and his political party on repeated occasions. When Guatemalanvoters turned against Ros in the 2003 election, all three Ixil municipios electedmayors from his political party. Yet Nebaj is so attractive to internationaldonors that they have chosen to overlook its political conservatism and born-again religiosity.

Despite all the projectssustainable agriculture and nontraditional exports;marketing cooperatives; a veterinary association and village pharmacies; amodel justice center with legal aid, mediators, translators, and sociologists toresuscitate traditional community law; food supplements and education for


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mothers and small children; medical teams from the United States andCubahow many times have I heard young Ixils lament that none of theseorganizations really help them?

If we look at Nebaj as an economy of desires and attempts to meet thosedesires, it is apparent that what Ixils want has changed dramatically over the

past 50 years. Because they are Native Americans, international donors wouldlike to believe that they are guardians of the earth, keepers of ancient wisdom,faithful defenders of their traditions. There are Ixils who fit this description;many do not. About their culture Ixils tend to feel the way that Americans likemyself feel about the 1950s. Sometimes we are nostalgic about the 1950s; some-times we are not. Getting drunk in honor of the saints, subsisting on diets ofmaize and beans, living in dank adobe housesIxils have good reasons toabandon many of their traditional ways. They are proud of who they are andwhere they come from, but they are also eager for the bright lights of modernity,the creature comforts that they see on television and that they can attain only

by abandoning many of the traditions that make them attractive to tourists.When international donors fell in love with Nebaj, they took on a mission

with no foreseeable end. Before the war, most Ixils engaged in below-subsistencefarming in which they made up for their land shortage by migrating to coastalplantations for several months a year. The majority of Ixil children did notattend school, and most Ixils lived and died without modern medical care.Their self-sufficiency ended when the army burned down their farmsteads inthe early 1980s. The majority of Ixils became refugees and learned how tostand in line for rations. They also learned that an array of instituciones couldbe petitioned for an array of needs. Que proyecto trae? (What project do

you bring?) became an acceptable opener with foreigners. As for all those aidagencies, they could hardly confine themselves to restoring the status quo.Before the war the majority of Ixils lived in huts without running water,latrines, and electricity, so all these necessities of modern life would have to beprovided for the first time. Moreover, because Ixil women still bear an averageof six children who begin reproducing in adolescence, every year Ixils starthundreds ofnew households. Therefore every year some combination of gov-ernment agencies and donors is being petitioned to finance modern housing,electricity, potable water, roads, schools, and health care for the equivalent ofseveral new villages sprouting across the landscape.

Arent development projects supposed to help people become self-sufficient?Arent they supposed to generate new sources of income? Dozens of Nebajprojects have tried to do just that. There have been successes, such as twoassociations that enable coffee growers to sell their crop at higher prices.Farmers in favorable microclimates are producing new exports such as Frenchbeans. But most Ixils do not have the right kind of land for such strategies.Even if the areas remaining large holdings were broken up (and many alreadyhave been), small cultivators would still not have enough land to become self-sufficient. According to a study by French agronomists, Ixil country is toosteep and has too little soil to provide the agricultural income needed topower the areas development (Aubry and Servadio, 2004). What about facto-ries? Maquiladoras across Central America are struggling against low-wagecompetition from China. As for retail commerce, every category has multipliedto the point of saturation. So has motor transportthe streets are clogged with


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vehicles whose owners barely make their monthly payments. Artisan produc-tion such as furniture and textiles provides employment but not of the kindthat satisfies aspiring consumers. None of these endeavors can absorb the tensof thousands of Ixil youth without enough land to live by farming. As a result,Nebajs most important product, its principal industry, continues to be the

export of surplus labor.

TWO STRATEGIES FOR SELF-SUFFICIENCY

In the 1990s there were two new ideas to make Ixils self-sufficient, the inter-actions between which will occupy the rest of this article. The first idea, con-ceived by aid consultants, was to make it easier for Ixils to borrow money sothat they could become entrepreneurs. We have all heard how microcreditscan help the poor work their way out of poverty. Even if that is not actually the

case, Ixils and other Mayas are eager for a safe place to put their savings; theyare also eager to make large purchases, and some indeed do manage to conjureup new businesses and jobs. For aid agencies, meanwhile, lending money toindividuals and partnerships avoids the endless accountability problems ofcommunal projects. Lending money to Ixils seemed like such a good idea that,by 2008, they could borrow from at least 23 banks, credit associations, andrevolving-loan funds within a few minutes walk from the Nebaj plaza.

The second way to make Ixils self-sufficientthis one conceived by Ixilsrather than aid consultantswas to seek a more advantageous market inwhich to sell their labor. Ixils have plenty of experience with selling their labor

on disadvantageous terms. When a family runs out of maize, several monthsbefore the next harvest, it is customary for the entire family to go to a coffeeplantationnot so much for the pay, which is minimal, but for the food ration.To earn money faster, up to US$11 a day, Ixil men go to coastal plantations tocut sugarcane, but the pace is too brutal for many. As for Guatemala City,thousands of Ixils have tried factory work and street sales, but living expensesare so high that the majority return without savings.

This leaves the United States, about which Ixils have been asking me fortwo decades. How much is a days pay? Can you help me find a job there?The same idea has occurred to many other Guatemalans. According to a U.S.Census (2006) projection, there are 875,000 Guatemalans in the United States,half of them legally (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2007). According tothe International Organization for Migration (IOM, 2008), there are 1.5 millionGuatemalans in the United States, a third of them legally. That would be one ofevery nine Guatemalans. In 2008 Guatemalans in the United States sent backUS$4.4 billion, the countrys largest source of foreign exchange and almostequal to the countrys total exports. According to the IOM, almost 1 millionGuatemalan households and more than 4 million Guatemalans (a third of thecountry) benefit from remittances.

In Nebaj the two largest credit institutions transmitted Q115 million fromthe United States in 2007. The following April they handled 2,653 remittances.If we add an estimated 1,225 remittances that same month through two othercredit institutions and two private agents and assume the same level of remit-tance, this would add up to Q169 million from the United States in 2007. From


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an estimated total of 3,878 remittances in April 2008 I estimate a sendingpopulation of 3,152not including Nebajenses who are unable to send any-thing.1 Except for a handful of pioneers in the 1990s and a few hundred othersin 20002001, most Nebajenses have gone north since 2002. Most are malesbetween the ages of 15 and 35, along with a few older men and wives joining

their husbands and a growing number of unmarried girls in their teens andearly twenties.

All but a handful of Nebajensesa spouse, a college student, a diplomaticemployeehave gone to the United States illegally. Only a few more havebeen able to obtain tourist visas. From many swindles and robberies in Mexico,Nebajenses have learned that they must pay Q40,000Q45,000 to humansmugglers, typically from the neighboring department of Huehuetenango,who deliver them to Mexican smugglers based in Chiapas. At 7.8 quetzals tothe dollar, each trip costs more than US$5,000. Typically Nebajenses are walkedor floatedacross the Guatemalan/Mexican border, then driven or shipped in

containersas far as Altar, Sonora, and then walked across the Arizona desertto safe houses in Phoenix, where they are detained until a relative or money-lender wires the balance to a Mexican bank.

Nebajenses have taken up residence from Los Angeles to Syracuse, but theytend to agglomerate because their lack of English makes them dependent onrelatives and friends to find work. Concentrations include Phoenix, West PalmBeach, and North Carolina, but the three largest are Homestead, a plant-nursery suburb of Greater Miami; Centerville, a Virginia suburb of Washington,DC; and Dover/New Philadelphia in southeastern Ohio. In the latter, Nebajenseswork for the union-busting meatpacker Case Farms and other nonunionized

factories. In Homestead and Centerville, they work for more establishedimmigrants who have learned the same lesson as Salvadorans and Peruvianson Long Islandthat they can climb into the American middle class only bytaking advantage of more recently arrived immigrants through chronic flout-ing of U.S. labor laws (Mahler, 1995).

For such employersimmigrants with U.S. residency or citizenshipNebajenses work 12 hours a day, six days a week, without overtime pay andwithout health insurance. Nebajenses are eager for overtime, but the habitualviolation of legal standards means that this is sweat labor (Gordon, 2005). Ifthey are not lucky enough to find such an employer, they stand beside theroad hoping that a passing motorist will offer a day or two of work. Yet somehave come home as men of means. Of the eight such persons I have inter-viewed, all went before 2003. The majority found unusually well-paid work inconstruction or an itinerant labor crew for an Anglo boss who spoke littleSpanish but was so impressed by their work ethic that he made them foremen.Equally impressed have been their fellow Nebajenses, thousands more ofwhom have gone north. Ever since, their relatives have been waiting for theremittances to pour back. The majority have been disappointed. Why isnt hesending money, they ask, or sending only US$100 a month, not enough to payback the loan that sent him north?

For wives, the answer may be all too obvious. Doa Feliciana (this and allnames have been changed) is a weaver who borrowed heavily to buy a com-fortable house. She is about to lose her house, according to Doa Feliciana,


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because her husband is in Minnesota getting drunk and chasing womeninstead of sending her money. Oh, I said brightly, give me his phone num-ber, and Ill call him when I get back to the United States. Out popped the cellphones, and, before I knew it, I was on the line with her no-good husband.Tell him he has to send us money or youre going to get him deported!

Feliciana hissed. And so I spoke with her husband, who had been away forseven years. An injury had put him out of work at a meatpacking plant. Afteran idle period, he had just joined a bakery at the lower wage of US$6.50 anhour. He and three other men were paying US$1,000 a month for an apartmentin which the pipes had frozen, so they had no running water.

Many Nebajenses who left between 2003 and 2006 have been able to sendhome enough money to buy a lot and start building a house or at least to makea down payment on a motor vehicle. A few are still sending back monthlyremittances of US$1,000 or more, but many are stalked by the fear of fracaso(failure).It turns out that, while sneaking into U.S. labor markets is an obvi-

ous way to obtain a higher price for ones labor, there are enormous risks.Nebajenses must find enough work to pay three major financial obligations:the money they owe for being smuggled into the United States, their livingexpenses (always higher than expected), and only then the large remittancesthat their families expect. Unfortunately, finding enough work to meet thethree obligations means competing with other Guatemalans and Mexicanswho have arrived in the same labor markets with the same idea. The worst-case scenario is to be arrested and deported after paying the US$5,000 butbefore being able to work off the debt. No legitimate occupation back inGuatemala will pay it. Now the migrant is under even more pressure than

before to invest another US$5,000 in a second try, doubling his wager on what-ever destiny awaits him.

Now for an obvious question: Where do Ixils borrow the small fortuneneeded to buy their way into the United States? If they already have a state-side relative with a steady job, he can pay the coyote (smuggler) out of hisearnings, but few Ixils are so blessed. If they still have a bit of land, they cansell itat the risk of ending up with no land at all. That leaves two other pos-sibilities. They can borrow the money from a local coyotea term that in Nebajrefers to a recruiter ( enganchador) or moneylender (prestamista) rather than anactual trafficker who takes Ixils across borders. Unfortunately, Nebaj money-lenders typically charge 10 percent interest a month. Even though interest isnot compounded, the debt will double in less than a year and triple in lessthan two years.

The other place to borrow US$5,000 is from one of those 23 banks, creditunions, and revolving-loan funds. Their purpose is not to finance illegalmigration; if anything, easy credit is supposed to help Guatemalans stay athome and earn their living locally. Officially, no Nebaj institution will accepta loan application for going to the United States, but until recently loan offi-cers did not necessarily view the diversion of their loans to wage migration asa serious problem. Indeed, the two largest institutions accepted remittances asevidence of the ability to repay a large loan that the borrower could neverrepay from Guatemalan income. Neither lenders nor borrowers thought muchabout what would happen if remittances dried up.


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THE WIVES-AND-MOTHERS PROBLEM

Knowingly or unknowingly, Nebajs credit institutions have taken oninvestments in the American Dream. They have imported into their balancesheets a tangle of complications that I will call the wives -and-mothers prob-

lem. Fathers and uncles are involved, but many of the people who borrowmoney to send their wagepilgrim north are female. They remain behind withthe debt, and, if their man fails, they pay a large share of the consequences.Once in debt Q40,000 for a trip northor Q80,000 or Q120,000, because fami-lies often send two or three siblings to keep each other companythey becomeaccustomed to chronic uncertainty over their future akin to that arising fromsending a man off to war. Their future hinges on whether remittances arrive,as well as on phone calls, which have become very cheap and very dangerousbecause they enable the instant transmission of misfortune and distrust. Hencethe proverbial phone call from the husband who has gotten drunk because he

lost his jobor has lost his job because he got drunkand accuses his wife ofinfidelity. When money fails to arrive, families wonder whether their man hasrelapsed into drinking or set up a new household with another woman. I haveno way of quantifying, but everyone in Nebaj agrees that illegal migration ishard on marriages. According to theIOM, 36 percent of the families of CentralAmerican migrants disintegrate(Prensa Libre, May 18, 2008).

Illegal migration is also hard on revolving-loan funds. When wives andmothers lose a wage earner to El Norte, many have tried to compensate byborrowing money from credit institutions at 2 percent a month (the most com-mon interest rate) in order to lend it to neighbors at 10 percent a month. They

hope to live off the difference. My first good look at this phenomenon occurredin October 2007 and April 2008, when I talked with a total of 24 Nebaj coyoteswho were recruiting and/or moneylending. (Since I was snowballing throughpersonal contacts, this is not necessarily a representative sample.) Fifteen weremen, ranging from occasional recruiters to fast-talking brokers sending up toa dozen migrants per monthonly three had ever gone to the United Statesthemselves. Of the nine women, at least five were borrowing money frominstitutions in order to lend it to migrants at 10 percent a month. Of the five,all but one were now saddled with defaulters from whom they had obtainedno collateral or collateral that turned out to be worthless. They were keepingtheir heads above water by taking out more loans.

One of the two female coyotes who has worked in El Norte, Doa Marta, isa weaver and a political activist. Around 2001 an anthropologist helped her andher husband to obtain a tourist visa from the U.S. embassy. As soon as theyarrived in the United States, they went to work in a factory. Three years laterMarta returned to Nebaj in a state of prosperity, prompting neighbors to askhow they could share in her good fortune. She decided to help them go northby providing loans at 10 percent a month. The loans were very profitable untilthree migrants failed to repay. Now she and her children were in danger ofdefaulting on their bank loans and losing their two-story house. Her husbandwas still in the United States, laboring for Korean grocers and angry that shehad lost his savings. What was their solution? Going even farther into debt tosend Doa Marta back to the United States, this time with three of her grownchildrennone of whom had found work as of May 2009.


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In this particular migration saga, the biggest loser thus far is a son-in-lawand his family. Thanks to a loan from Doa Marta, the son-in-law made it toLos Angeles but had a hard time finding a job. The night his wife was givingbirth to their first child back in Nebaj, he fell off a fire escape and landed onhis head. A hospital saved his life but only by removing part of his cranium.

After three months in a coma, he was released to his brother, who brought himback to Guatemala. When we met, he was lying in bed under a big Americanflag tacked to the wall. His parents had spent Q40,000 in eight fruitless con-sultations with neurosurgeons in the capital. His brother had gone north againbut not found steady work. At last report, the parents were in debt to threefinancial institutions and two moneylenders for Q160,000 and were about tolose their house and the last of their agricultural land.

The most successful of the nine female coyotes is Doa Maria. The majorityof her family was massacred by the army when she was a child, and from theage of 14 to 16 she was a combatant in the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. In the

late 1980s army offensives pressured thousands of EGPadministered civiliansinto surrendering, including Maria. After several narrow escapes she then fledIxil country to work in factories. In the 1990s a refugee organizer persuaded herto return and administer programs for women, for which she received a salaryand eventually a house. Maria was unusual in having only two children. Itsgood to show that its not just men who have capacity, that we women can getahead as well, she told me. Sometimes men dont know how to handlemoney, they waste money, drinking in bars and chasing other women. In con-trast, women are responsible for children, were more responsible; we canprovide education for our children and get ahead.

While buying project animals in Huehuetenango, Maria met a coyote whoasked her to help him find new customers. Between 2004 and 2008 she sent 40people north, in each case paying for the trip as far as the Mexican border butno farther until her customers reached a safe house in Phoenix, whereupon shewired a bank transfer to the seor coyote in Comitn, Chiapas. By January2009 Maria had two problems. First, she owed Q72,000 for two migrants whowere arrested and deported only a few days after she paid for their safearrival. Second, she owed Q11,200 to four credit institutions every month.Keeping up with relentless payments would require sending more migrantsnorth, but Ixil job seeking in the United States was going so badly that somewould turn into defaulters.

HOW DOA ESPERANZA INTERPRETED SOLIDARITY

This is not the first time that Ixils have had trouble repaying loans. Duringthe coffee boom in the early twentieth century, ladino (nonindigenous) entre-preneurs used distilled alcohol to tempt Ixils into borrowing money for reli-gious fiestas and then used the debts to grab land and turn Ixils into peons.Predatory ladino moneylending is much reduced, but this is probably whereIxils learned to charge 10 percent interest a month. Strangely, Ixils charge eachother this rate without incurring opprobrium. I have yet to detect a local termwith the negative connotation of loan-sharking; a monthly rate of 5 percentis regarded as generous, and it is only 15 to 20 percent that is perceived as


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unneighborly. Still, until recently few Ixils had the wherewithal to make largeloans, so they seized or lost little property in this manner.

Then two developments multiplied the funds at their disposal. First, anItalian contractor of the United Nations Development Program, the Programfor Displaced People, Refugees, and Returnees in Central America (PRODERE),

earned a terrible reputation by lavishing most of its large budget on itself. Byway of compensation, PRODERE left behind revolving-loan funds that soondisappeared into the pockets of Ixil administrators and borrowers. Second, thenewly arrived gospel of microfinance assured the aid organizations of the nextwave that they could set up more credit programs and, armed with the latestdevelopment lingo, ignore what had happened to their predecessors (FacetaCentral Desarrollo Empresarial, 2002). Soon there was nothing micro- aboutthe amounts being lent by the larger agencies, particularly Banrural, a USAID-supported Guatemalan bank, and COTONEB, an Ixil-organized credit union.Both were willing to lend Q50,000 or more, accepted remittance stubs as proof

of the capacity for repayment, and required collateral in the form of propertytitles. Some loan officers suggested setting up a credit bureau to detect double-dippers, but higher-ups rejected the idea.

Meanwhile, smaller organizations busied themselves with actual micro-credits of Q10,000 or less. Instead of asking for collateral, they followed theexample of the Grameen Bank and required their borrowers to join so-calledsolidarity groups. In a solidarity group, no one can obtain a second loan untileveryone has repaid the first. This can produce a high level of repayment butbecause of social pressure rather than solidarity.

In Nebaj, a particular case put loan officers on notice that many of their

credits would never be repaid. In 2007 a 52-year-old villager named Esperanzaorganized more than 50 women into a series of solidarity groups. But thesewere not solidarity groups as envisioned by microcredit agencies; they wereset up in secret by Doa Esperanza and her confederates. Each member ofeach group applied for credit as an individual and then turned the moneyover to Doa Esperanza in exchange for a regalo (gift) of up to several hundredquetzals. Doa Esperanza said that she would take charge of repaying eachloan. That same year, she also approached more than a dozen neighbors andasked them for loans tooagain one-on-one, to prevent anyone from graspingthe scale of her borrowing.

A few months later, five different institutions in the municipal seat real-ized that they had more than 50 female borrowers in a single village whodenied that they had any obligation to repay their loans. Instead, thewomen pointed to Doa Esperanza, who, on December 17, 2007, loadedher possessions and chickens on the early-morning bus and left for GuatemalaCity. When I showed up looking for victims, one of the first doors onwhich I knocked led to a meeting with six of Doa Esperanzas creditorswho had lent her a total of Q122,000. Just one of her solidarity groupsthe12 women of Las Rosasgave her Q115,000. If these are average totals forthe 75 victims who had stepped forward as of May 2008, Esperanza managedto borrow Q978,000 or US$125,000equivalent to the annual income of 100poor households.

What could she have done with so much money? Doa Esperanza declinedto speak with me. Her Spanish is minimal, she has never gone to school, and


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she does not know how to read and write. She has no criminal record and, likemany Ixils seeking to get ahead, belongs to an evangelical church. Her onlyantecedent is that she belonged to a community bank ( banco comunal), thatis, a solidarity group set up by a microcredit agency. When asking neighborsfor loans, she pointed to the new house she was building (another handsome

two-story affair) and a son studying to be a lawyer as the reasons she neededto borrow. She would repay, she explained, with remittances from her hus-band and another son, both in the United States. But like so many Ixils gonenorth, her husband and son failed to find enough employment to build thehouse of their dreams. This, evidently, was another way.

Three months after Doa Esperanza fled, a village delegation found hernear Guatemala City. Instead of turning her over to the police, they broughther back to Ixil country. According to Esperanza, it was all the fault of herhusband, who had instructed her to duplicate property deeds, and of her sonstudying law, who had instructed her to organize women into multiple bor-

rowing groups. They had all the money, she claimed. The response of the hus-band and son was to sue her for defamation. Victims could not take possessionof the house because, while it was being built by Esperanza, one of her sonsheld the title. Nor could they sue the husband or son, because the only onewho owed them anything was Esperanza. My guess is that the budding law-yer figured out how to take advantage of all the weaknesses in the creditsystem so that his mothers debts would be unrecoverable.

Doa Esperanza is not the only credit sinkhole being peered into by Nebajloan officers. She is just one of at least five women who have used their socialskills to orchestrate loan rings, not to mention a far larger number of borrowers

no one knows how manywho decided to meet those burdensome monthlypayments by taking out a second loan with another institution, and thenmaybe a third and a fourth. New institutions arriving with fresh capital havenever been lacking, because, as I have mentioned previously, Nebaj is a townwhere so many aid organizations want to work.

By 2008 Nebaj loan officers conceded that many of their borrowers wereoverindebted. They blamed competition among institutions for fostering aculture of nonpayment. Several of the loan officers also blamed the most phil-anthropic institutions, which do not have to recover capital for their funders,do not confiscate property pledged as collateral, and tend to prioritize loansto women. Since loan officers tend to be men, this chain of reasoning leads toblaming the seoras. Here is what Doa Esperanzas loan officer told me abouther, with an I-told-you-so air:

Her attitude changed. She became one of these seoras who walks down thestreet with her cell phone, talking about her movements, always with her deals,maybe shes involved in fraud. Cell phones are for emergencies and business-men. The [women] always want to borrow larger amounts. I saw the change andtold myself, the next time the loan will not be paid.

THE WOMENS DEBT COMMITTEE

Aside from their headaches over the seoras, Nebaj loan officers are wor-ried that all the bad news from the United Statesincluding the recession,


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Ixils losing jobs in the construction industry, and enforcement of immigrationlawswill cut off the remittances that so many of their clients need torepay their loans. And so we come to the debtors committee, which hasgone through several name changes including the Organization of WomenAffected by the Economic Crisis in the Ixil Area. The first petition, in October

2008, begins:

We are victims of the Internal Armed Conflict which brought poverty and hun-ger to our children and families. After the signing of the peace accords, we wereleft without material goods, all that remained was our house lot. This obligedsome families to journey to the United States to pursue the American Dream, butunfortunately some of us have not had the luck to attain it, with the result thatwe return home with empty hands.

According to the petition, 76 individualsall but 11 of them womenowe atotal of Q5.4 million. That is an average of Q71,000 or US$9,000 per household

in a town where many households get by on US$1,500 a year or less .When I visited in January and June 2009, the committee was in more or less

permanent session. A stream of women who spoke little Spanish pulled loandocuments out of blouses and asked me to decipher them. The executive com-mittee consisted of women proficient in Spanish. Two of the founders hadbeen men, but they were now leading a rival group, partly because of theirdubious personal antecedents and partly because an all-woman organizationwould be more appealing to donors. There is a long history of aid projects toempower Ixil women, and the debt committee is the latest result. The meet-ings consist almost entirely of women, but the first I attended was opened by

a pentecostal pastor and closed by another pentecostal pastor, both of whomled the group in vocal appeals to the Almighty.

Gringos also have a certain magical quality in Nebaj, so I too was welcometo the deliberations. Even though I reiterated that I did not represent an aidorganization, could not pay their debts, and was only doing a study, my pres-ence signified that the internacionales cared about their plight, and womenlined up to tell me their stories. Forty women (all but a few with husbands), aman, and a couple explained their situations to me. The average debt theyreported was Q126,500 or more than US$16,000 per household. Thirty of themhad lent money or property titles to others. The purpose, in 25 of the cases,

was to send someone to the United States. Eight of the 25 deals had beenundermined by deportation, 2 by the death of the migrant, and 3 by incapaci-tating injuries. Ten of the 42 family heads I interviewed had already lost theirhouses to foreclosure or debt-forced sale. Unfortunately, Guatemala providesno bankruptcy protection for ones house.

The president of the committee, whom I will call Doa Sara, was a small,bustling figure who in January had the reassuring air of a fairy godmother butby June was being ground down by adversity. Ixil women are known for theirintricate weaving, and this is how Sara used to make her living; in fact, shewas a protg of Padre Javier Gurriarn, the Spanish priest who introducedliberation theology to Nebaj before he was run out by the army, and she hadparticipated in a succession of projects to empower women. Liberation theo-logians and feminists are horrified by born-again Protestantism, but DoaSara is now a born-again Protestant like most other Ixil leaders.


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We all have our work before the Lord, Sara told me:

The people here are very poor, and my work is to help them with their journeys.My husband was drinking, he didnt support me, and I was weaving to earn myliving, but I was really getting tired and my legs were affected. So five years agoI switched to this kind of work. The gentlemen at Banrural gave me a hand andI gave a hand to those who travel north. Thats why I lent them money for thetripyes, at 10 percent interest per monthuntil they have their own remit-tances and can take out their own loan from the bank.

In short, Doa Sara was borrowing money at 2 percent a month in order tolend it to migrants at 10 percent a month, aside from receiving Q5,000 com-missions per head from the coyote.

In the first three years, she estimated, she had doubled her investment ineach migrant she sent north. When I asked how many, she showed me heraccounts. They consisted of tattered school copybooks in which she had jotted

down names, phone numbers, and arithmetic in no apparent order (she hastwo years of formal education). Of all the people she sent north, only five hadfailed to pay her, but these five had sunk her. Once in the United States, theyeither could not find work or decided that repaying her was not a priority.When she approached the father of one deadbeat, his response was: Tie meup and kill me if you want, but I cannot pay.

The past two years have been hell for Doa Sara. She showed me a bag ofpills she was taking to get to sleep. According to the October 2008 petition, sheowed four different institutions a total of Q160,000. But according to Sara her-self, she owed Q300,000 to just one institutionBanruraland another

Q300,000 to at least six of her neighbors. I say at least because rarely did aday go by that I did not hear more about her tangled affairs. Functionaries atthree additional institutions claimed that she had also borrowed from thembut through intermediaries, on their own property deeds. If the accusationsare true, Doa Sara borrowed from at least seven different institutions. Shewas able to stay current with Banrural only by persuading neighbors to lendher money or property titles which she used as collateral for new bank loans.Many of the new deals cost her 10 percent monthly, with each supposedlyguaranteed by the imminent repayment of previous deals. One creditorstripped her kitchen of its appliances. Another creditor put a lien on the sala-

ries of her daughter and her husband. She wanted to sell her two-story housebut was getting no offers, and Banrural initiated legal proceedings to take it.

By January 2009 Doa Saras group had grown to 221 members. None of the42 family heads I interviewed were as deeply in the hole as she was, but themajority had several things in common: (1) they had borrowed large amountsof money from institutions at low rates of interest; (2) they had turned aroundand lent the money to someone else they thought they could trust; (3) thatperson was usually going north or sending a husband or son there; (4) theyhoped to live off the difference between the two rates of interest.

In its October 2008 petition, the debtors committee accused the institutionsof failing to verify their ability to paythat is, failing to detect that they wereengaging in multiple borrowing. According to the same petition, the 76 house-holds were indebted to an average of 3.1 institutions each, with 29 reportingdebts to 4 or more institutions. When the serial debts collapse, agricultural


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land is the first to be sold or seized, then the house and often a relatives orneighbors property as well. In one such case, Doa Sara persuaded herdaughter-in-law Violeta to use the title to her house to borrow Q25,000 froman association and give her the money. Sara managed four payments on theloan before she went into arrears and penalties doubled the debt. Violeta had

not consulted her husband before putting up their house as collateral, andwhen he found out he beat her so badly that she had to go to the hospital. Ina compromise, a judge gave the couple four months to come up with Q38,000to save their house.

Please tell the internationalists that there is no peace because the institu-tions take advantage of women who cannot read or write, Doa Sara told me.We beseech international human rights to protect the rights of Ixil women.Expeditions to the capital led to a Spanish organizations offering an income-generating project of the weaving-and- vegetable variety that will not gener-ate enough income to save houses from foreclosure. Brushing aside doubts

within the committee, Doa Sara persisted in looking for a bailout. They saythey are going to give us a project, but we do not need projects. What we needis to speak with the First Lady Sandra [de Colom] so that she will speak withthe bank. What we need is a fund to pay our debts. But the First Lady turnedthem down, and by June 2009 Banrural was processing 40 foreclosures at thelocal courthouse, with many more to follow.

NEBAJ AS A BUBBLE ECONOMY

Loan officers holding houses and land as collateral were convinced that, ifthey took pity on the most innocent and needy defaulters, the bulk of their cli-entele would stop paying. That is what happened in the 1990s when Nebajsfirst generation of revolving loans vanished. After some borrowers stoppedpaying, entire villages followed suit. Even then, some borrowers had put up realestate as collateral, but loan agencies declined to confiscate it. European Unionadministrators wanted to help Ixils, not profit from them; taking their propertyseemed immoral, and so, without intending to, donors accustomed Ixils to theidea that any debt with an institucin would sooner or later be forgiven.

In the gospel of easy credit as a development strategy, the most appealingassumption is that lack of cheap credit is a major cause of poverty. But mostpoor people are not budding entrepreneurs. Most people in wealthy countriesare not budding entrepreneurs. When people borrow money, it is usually forconsumption or emergencies, not for productive investment. According toresearchers in South Asia, many microborrowers are unable to invest in aprofitable enterprise. When they fail to generate a new income stream, theyare trapped into loan recyclingpaying off the old loan by taking out a newloanor selling off precious assets, making themselves poorer. As for the highrates of repayment achieved through so-called solidarity groups, these groupsare actually liability groups that can be used by unscrupulous borrowers tooffload their obligations onto gullible cosigners. Because group liability is soexploitable, microcredit is as likely to undermine preexisting solidarity as to rein-force it. At bottom, viewing microcredit as a panacea ignores the power relationswithin neighborhoods and families, through which even a modest loan can


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become yet another instrument of exploitation (Lont and Hospes, 2004; Bond,2006; Dichter, 2006; Cons and Paprocki, 2008).

Still, because financial institutions charge much lower rates of interest thanthe rates that Nebajenses charge each other, would this not undermine loan-sharking? Paradoxically, in Nebaj easy credit seems to have increased loan-

sharking by multiplying the amount of cash that Ixils have to lend to eachother. For returned migrants, the most obvious way to multiply their usuallyslender savings is to lend it to the next wave of migrants, either directly orthrough a moneylender who becomes their broker. Loans to migrants are alsothe most obvious way for stay-at-homes to make money, and the most obvioussource of capital is to go to a credit institution with a story about needing themoney for something else. Thus migration north has become a credit sinkholenot just for Ixils in the United States who are struggling to make their invest-ment pay but also for Ixils back home who are attracted by the high return.The result is chains of debt, the funds for which originate in remittances and

institutional credits, which then get farmed out in idiosyncratic person-to-person deals, each at a higher rate of interest than the last, until one collapsesand default reverberates back down the chain.

Why would Ixils engage in such risky behavior? Until recently, as I havesaid, they had no experience with a bank or savings-and-loan actually seizingcollateral. Then, too, it is easy to find borrowers who lack basic arithmetic andhave fallen for ludicrous pitches. But Ixils are also peasants who, in their com-petition for increasingly scarce land and jobs, have schooled each other in theprecise calculation of self-interest. Doa Marta, Doa Maria, and Doa Sara aresavvy market women, and many of the migrants are obviously energetic and

intelligent. Yet even households that have incurred heavy losses and that havepersonal experience with the despair of standing on a U.S. curb waiting for thenext day of work ask me to help them send more of their youth north.

Two additional explanations for high-risk borrowing emerge from the sto-ries I have heard. First, once Nebajenses are in danger of losing a house or land,the only way to save it is to seek U.S.-level wages. Second, all the new sourcesof cashfrom aid projects, loans, and remittanceshave had a severe impacton the price of real estate in Nebaj. The scholarly literature on sending com-munities includes terse references to rates of inflation (Kyle, 2000: 103; Smith,2006: 50; Foxen, 2007: 98), which turn out to be astronomical. In Nebaj it is not

just the price of pasture and cropland that has skyrocketed. So has the cost ofhouse lots, a matter of urgent concern to a typical family with five, six, orseven children surviving to adulthood, most of whom will have to build newhouses. In early 2008 typical prices for house lots in the town of Nebaj wereQ200,000Q250,000 (US$25,000$32,000); even on the edge of town and invillages lots were selling for US$5,000$10,000, and good agricultural landreached the level of US$6,000 an acre.

Thanks to all the inflows of aid, credit, and remittances, Nebaj has becomea bubble economy or, more precisely, a dependent inflationary economy. Theeconomy is dependent in that, although the main livelihood is still farming,the community is unable to produce enough food to sustain itself and there-fore depends on exporting labor to the outside world. It is inflationary in thatthe inflow of aid donations, credits, and remittances from the United Stateshas led to a price bubble for assets that are in fixed supply. Land is the prime


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example (in stark contrast to labor, which continues to be very cheap). Thusaid donations, credits, and remittances have increased the supply of money inNebaj, the price of house lots and agricultural land has risen beyond reach,and the only way that youth can afford to buy real estate is by undertaking allthe risks of seeking work in the United States.

IS WAGE-DRIVEN MIGRATIONBECOMING DEBT-DRIVEN MIGRATION?

At the time of my most recent visit in June 2009, remittances had plunged.I could obtain no figures, but, judging from remarks at three agencies, remit-tances were roughly half what they had been a year before. Default rateswere climbing into the teens. Ixils were still going north but only in smallnumbers, apparently because many had grasped the lack of jobs and, in any

case, it was much harder to raise the necessary Q40,000. The price of realestate had collapsed, making it impossible for debtors and creditors torecover their capital. And so the bubble had turned into Nebajs own versionof the global credit crisis. In an uncanny anticipation of the U.S. bubble andhow it burst, Ixil speculators borrowed other peoples money to multiplytheir gains but only by incurring higher risks that are now bankrupting boththem and their creditors.

What should we make of Nebajs sagas of indebtedness? Let me close witha minimalist and then a maximalist interpretation. For a minimalist, Nebaj isa special case because of its peculiar attractiveness to loan institutions and

because Ixils are so new to the U.S. labor market that they are especially vul-nerable to an economic downturn. As for the womens debt committee, it mayrepresent only the most vulnerable (in some cases, self-destructive) membersof the population. The committees 221 households constitute less than 2 percentof the municipios 14,000 or so households. Even if we assume that debt issinking every migrant to the United States and that every migrant comes froma separate household (neither of which is the case), my estimate of 4,000Nebajenses in El Norte would mean that less than 30 percent of households arebeing pulled down by bad bets of this nature. The actual number of migration-sunk households is smaller, but multiple borrowing and debt chains afflict awider circle of households that have never sent anyone north. I am unable toestimate the number, but any visitor will be able to confirm that the topic ofdebt occasions much shaking of heads.

The womens debt committee would like to be viewed as victims of Banrural,two smaller banks with more conservative lending policies, three savings-and-loan cooperatives, and the microcreditsa panoply that deserves more atten-tion than I can give it here. Banrural is a profit-driven private bank thatmarkets itself as a public-service enterprise (your friend who helps yougrow) and has mushroomed in response to the indigenous demand for bank-ing services. COTONEB is a home-grown operation whose Swiss-cheese port-folio endangers Q15 million of the Nebajenses own savings. Other outfits arefunded by varying combinations of local deposits, donations, and low-interestcapital from governments, international organizations, and corporations. It canbe no accident that, during the same period in which bankers were pushing so


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much credit on Americans, they were pushing credit on Guatemalans withsimilar results. Collectively, the towns loan institutions are indeed respon-sible for tempting low-income households with far more credit than theycould handle.

But to blame only the loan institutions is to ignore the agency of the bor-

rowers, including the considerable skill with which some Ixils have takenadvantage of other Ixils. Once we bestow the term community on ourselvesor an attractive population such as the Nebajenses, we expect the people inquestion to support each other. But an Ixil town is not a community in thewarm, supportive sense evoked by writers of grant proposals. Ixil social life isextremely competitive, in ways that are very common among peasants. Themost obvious compulsion is that land and employment are extremely scarce,and the most obvious reason for the scarcity is that the population has beendoubling every 25 years. Population growth has ended any possibility of self-sufficient subsistence agriculture for most Ixils.

The people of Nebaj face cruel choices, and I know many who have madedeep sacrifices for each other. But when some choose narrow definitions ofself-interest, exploitation reaches into the heart of neighborhoods and fami-lies. One strategy for a struggling below-subsistence cultivator is to engendermore wage earners, who will expand his household income in their adolescentyears but inherit even less land than he did. They think of their family like amachine of production, a young Ixil feminist claimed. Many think like that.They look on their children as machines to exploit. They think, The more chil-dren I have, the more they can support me. Another strategy is to take advan-tage of the confianza (trust) of ones near-and-dear and leave them holding the

bag.Some of the stories I have heard from betrayed spouses, parents, andsiblings are heart-rending.

The fallible humanity of the Nebajenses leads me to a maximalist interpreta-tion of their debt crisisthat it is generated by the very process of seekingwork in the United States. According to this reading, Nebajs debt levels are aparticularly dramatic example of a much wider aspect of mass migration norththat usually escapes scrutiny. In Nebaj debt has become visible because Ixilsare accustomed to crafting their problems into aid appeals. In the Departmentof Chimaltenango debt has become visible because of the 287 Guatemalansdeported after the 2008 Postville, Iowa, raid. According to the NationalCouncil for Attention to the Migrant, 158 of them have returned to debts rang-ing from Q5,000 to Q100,000 that threaten their land and houses (Fernndezand Bonillo, 2009).

Debt has escaped scrutiny not just because migrants are usually reluctantto talk about it but also because many researchers seem to share the assump-tion of the migrants themselves that the U.S. economy has a boundless capac-ity to absorb them. True, as long as migrants are able to find remunerativeemployment, debt should be a temporary expedient, even if they are payingexorbitant amounts of interest. But Ixils were failing to find enough employ-ment before the 2008 credit crisis, as were other Guatemalans and CentralAmericans standing next to them on curbs. It was when they began toagglomerate on street corners that wage migration began to look suspiciouslylike debt migration. In debt migration, debt not only enables the move butrequires further migration, in a steady extraction of value from the sending


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population that will probably never be returned, appearances such as thosetwo- and three-story houses to the contrary.

Fred Krissman (2005: 14) has pointed out a crucial omission in the migrant-network model of Douglas Massey that has been so popular with scholars. Byfocusing on symmetrical relationships between migrants who come from the

same hometown, the migrant-network model takes at face value the norma-tive ideals of the people in question, who stress loyalty to family and locality.Thus the migrant-network model focuses on the supportive and cooperativeaspect of migration streams. But what about all the conflicts of interest thatany serious ethnography reveals? The migrant-network model also sidelineskey figures such as employers, human smugglers, and labor contractors. Inshort, it implies a smooth functionalism that anthropologists and sociologistshave long put behind us in other realms. It underestimates the competitivequality of migration as a chain of exploitation in which each actorthe employer,the coyote, the migrantpasses along a risk or wager to someone else with less

power who, when the wager goes bad, pays the price. Those passed-alongrisks and chains of debt are what are now taking the land and houses of Ixilswho have never set foot in the United States.

It is tempting to ignore the implications of these chains of debt (cf. Vlez-Ibaez, 2004: 130) and extractions of value because of the importance ofremittances to national economiesindeed, the dependence of entire nationaleconomies upon them. The glamour of macroeconomics has made it easy tobypass the critical question of exactly who gets remittances, who does not,and the impact on the have-nots. The dilemma I see exemplified in Nebaj issimple: If remittances set off inflationary spirals in sending populations, then

they pressure wider circles of people to come north. When have-nots godeeply into debt to keep up with their neighbors, they take on enormous risk.Wherever remittances have produced dependent inflationary economies, aninner ring of apparent success stories could be surrounded by less visibleouter rings of imitators who are indebting themselves to go north, failing tofind sufficientemployment, and losing assets.

But waitwhat about the impact of border enforcement? True, tougherenforcement of the U.S.-Mexican and Mexican-Guatemalan borders, along withthe rampant criminality that border enforcement spawns, have multiplied thecost of the trip and with it the obligatory debt. In the early 1990s one of the firstIxils to go north paid less than US$2,000. Without border enforcement, a pass-port application and bus fare would cost less than a tenth of what the trip cur-rently costs Nebajenses. Without border enforcement, migrants would not gointo the hole so quickly and deeply. Yet I doubt that border enforcement is thefundamental problem. Once remittances hyperinflate the cost of real estate ina peasant locality, every family is under pressure to send at least one memberto the United States, where the migrants will tend to flood the ethnic nichesthat are open to them (Kaufman, 2000: 363). If this cruel paradox is not unique toNebajif instead it is common in peasant populationsthen the chain migra-tion that inflation engenders is guaranteed to produce deficits as migrants payU.S.-level prices without stable U.S.-level incomes.

In conclusion, I wonder if migration and debt are generating each other inother Latin American localities. If the right to cross the U.S. border and seek


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employment is the main issue, then denying that right is the way capitalismforces Latin Americans into the unregulated underground of the U.S. econ-omy. Legalizing unauthorized immigrants should enable them to demandtheir rights. But if converging streams of migrants from multiple countriesflood the available ethnic niches, as has already occurred with the Ixils, labor

organizing is unlikely to rescue them from their actual function in capitalism,which is to serve as the reserve army of the unemployed. To assume thatmore and more competing migration streams and more and more surplusworkers will eventually achieve their place in the sun is to assume that theU.S. economy can offer near-limitless employment. Cornucopian assump-tions about capitalism should come easy for the Wall Street Journal but not forcritics of capitalism (Chacn and Davis, 2006; Bacon, 2008) who are calling foropen borders.

NOTE

1. According to local directors, in April 2008 the Banrural branch in Nebaj received 2,338 remit-tances and the COTONEB savings and loan received 315, for a total of 2,653. Estimates from twoother financial institutions and two private agents would add 1,225 more remittances thatmonth, for a total of 3,878. If half the remitters are sending money twice a month, one-quarterare sending it once a month, one-eighth are sending it four times a month, and one-eighth aresending it once every two months, the sending population would be 3,152. If a quarter of theNebajenses in the north are not remitting any money at all, the total population in the UnitedStates would be 3,940.

REFERENCES

Aubry, Laura and Charlotte Servadio2004 Intensificacin y migracines temporales frente a la presin hipotecaria: diagnsticoagrario de dos valles altos del municipio de Nebaj, area Ixil, Guatemala. Ph.D. diss., InstitutoNacional Agronmico Paris-Grignon.

Bacon, David2008 Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Boston:Beacon Press.

Bond, Patrick

2006 Beyond microcredit evangelism. http://www.pambazuka.org (accessed September15, 2008).Chacn, Justin Akers and Mike Davis

2006 No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Chicago:Haymarket Books.

Cohen, Jeffrey H.2004 The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cons, Jason and Kasia Paprocki2008 The Limits of MicrocreditA Bangladesh Case. Food First Backgrounder 14 (4).

Dichter, T.2006 Hype and hope: the worrisome state of the microcredit movement. http://www.microfinancegateway.org (accessed September 22, 2008).

Faceta Central Desarrollo Empresarial2002 Realizacin de un inventario y tipificacin de la oferta-demanda de crdito en el Tringulo Ixil .Convenio GUA/B7-2120/98/482. (Report to the U.S. Agency for International Development.)Guatemala City.


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Fernndez, Marcela and Cristina Bonillo2009 Estafan a migrantes deportados de Postville. Prensa Libre, August 26.

Fletcher, Peri L.1999 La Casa de Mis Sueos : Dreams of Home in a Transnational Mexican Community. Boulder:Westview Press.

Foxen, Patricia

2007 In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.Gordon, Jennifer

2005 Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.International Organization for Migration

2008 Encuesta sobre remesas 2008 y medio ambiente . Cuadernos de Trabajao sobre Migracin,September. Guatemala City.

Kaufman, Kathy A.2000 Outsourcing the hearth: the impact of immigration on labor allocation in Americanfamilies, pp. 345368 in Nancy Foner, Ruben G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold (eds.),Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell SageFoundation.

Krissman, Fred

2005 Sin coyote ni patrn: why the migrant network fails to explain international migration.International Migration Review 39 (2): 444.

Kyle, David2000 Transnational Peasants: Migrations, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.Levitt, Peggy

2001 The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press.Lont, Hotze and Otto Hospes (eds.)

2004 Livelihood and Microfinance: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on Savings andDebt. Amsterdam: Eburon Delft.

Mahler, Sarah1995American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Miles, Ann2004 From Cuenca to Queens: An Anthropological Story of Transnational Migration. Austin:University of Texas Press.

Nazario, Sonia2006 Enriques Journey. New York: Random House.

Smith, Robert Courtney2006 Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

U.S. Census2006 Hispanic or Latino Origin by Specific Origin: 2006 American Community Survey.Washington,DC.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security2007 Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: PopulationEstimates August 2007. Washington, DC.

Vlez-Ibaez, Carlos G.2004 The political ecology of debt and class formation among Mexican colonias in theSouthwestern United States, pp. 129151 in Hotze Lont and Otto Hospes (eds.), Livelihoodand Microfinance: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on Savings and Debt. Amsterdam:Eburon Delft.

david stoll - wage migration to debt migration

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